A delicate talent

When, 15 years ago, Nicola Beauman embarked on this life of ‘the other Elizabeth Taylor’, the novelist and not the film star, she had been deprived of documents that would certainly have been of tremendous use to her. These were the letters that, over a period of some three decades, Taylor wrote regularly and at length to the novelist Robert Liddell, living in self-exile in Greece. Aware that she was terminally ill, she asked him to burn her side of their correspondence, and no less regrettably then destroyed his. Was he right to obey this injunction from a woman whom he himself described as the best letter-writer of the 20th century? I myself, as I told him at the time, thought not; but others, perhaps morally more scrupulous, approved.

The reason usually given for Taylor’s demand is that, intensely private and discreet, she did not wish revelations about her life or the lives of her neighbours to gain general currency.